Biography

Elisabetta Mereu obtained a MSc degree in Mathematics at the University of Cagliari (Italy) in 2009. In 2015, she earned a PhD degree in Genetics at the Microcitemico Pediatric Hospital and University of Cagliari. During her PhD, she worked at the Institute of Genetics and Biomedical Research (IRGB, National Research Council - Cagliari, Italy) and at the University of California (UCSF) in the department of Neurology, where her research projects concerned the interrogation of genomic-scale datasets for the identification of genetic mutations and integration of regulatory information in the context of complex diseases susceptibility. In 2016, she started working as computational postdoc at the National Center for Genomic Analysis of Spain (CNAG-CRG, Barcelona). Her research focus is on the analysis and interpretation of data from individual cells to determine the cellular composition of tissues and track transcriptional dynamics in health and disease. She works in a wide range of projects in collaboration with national, international research groups and consortia, such as the Human Cell Atlas and the European Pancreas Cell Atlas ESPACE. She extensively worked on the systematic comparison of single-cell RNA-seq protocols in addition to being familiar with diverse single-cell technologies and their data integration. Her expertise includes the development of machine learning tools as well as other computational methods for the analysis of single-cell genomics data. During her postdoc, she published more than 10 articles, 2 of these as first author, in high-ranked scientific journals including Nature Biotechnology, Genome Biology, Cell Stem Cell and Genome Research. In 2020, she was granted with a Juan de la Cierva Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2021, she started as Junior Group Leader of the Cellular Systems Genomics Group at the Josep Carreras Institute in Barcelona.